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By five o'clock in the afternoon Henry was being advised to run away. One of the women, a Wall Street analyst, insisted that Henry was too nice to go to prison. She had a place in Canada. He could stay there for a while. She could fly up on weekends. By five-thirty Karen called. She had been able to track him down by calling the wives of the men with whom he had been partying. Al Newman, the bondsman who had been carrying Henry on the fifty-thousand-dollar appeal bond, had received a call from the prison authorities threatening to revoke the bond. They were going to declare Henry a fugitive. Newman told Karen the insurance company would not cover the loss. Al would have had to get up the fifty thousand himself. He was desperate for Henry to turn himself in. Karen was frantic about having to support herself for the next few years, and now she was afraid she would also have the burden of paying off Henry's forfeited bond. When Henry hung up after speaking with her on the phone, he realized that everyone— with the possible exception of bis friends at the bar— wanted him to go to prison. He had one last Eagle, swallowed some Valiums, kissed everyone goodbye, and told the limo driver to take him to jail.
The Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary is a massive walled city of twenty-two hundred inmates set amid the dark hills and abandoned coal mines of central Pe
"The bus stopped at a cement building just inside the walls. The guards were all screaming and yelling that we were in prison and not at some country club. As soon as we got off the bus I saw at least five guards with machine guns, who watched us while some other guards removed our cuffs and leg shackles. I was wearing tan army fatigues I'd gotten at West Street when I signed myself in, and I was freezing. I remember looking down at the floor—it was wet red tile— and I could feel the damp come right up through the soles of my shoes. The guards walked us through a long cement tu
"When it was my turn to get the bedroll I looked up. Right there in the reception area, standing next to the guards, I saw Paulie. He was laughing. Next to Paulie I saw Joh
"After they checked me in, Paulie and Joh
"Right from the begi
"After two months of orientation I joined Paulie, Joh
"It was wild. There was wine and booze, and it was kept in bath-oil or after-shave jars. The hacks in the honor dorm were almost all on the take, and even though it was against the rules, we used to cook in our rooms. Looking back, I don't think Paulie went to the general mess five times in the two and a half years he was there. We had a stove and pots and pans and silverware stacked in the bathroom. We had glasses and an ice-water cooler where we kept the fresh meats and cheeses. When there was an inspection, we stored the stuff in the false ceiling, and once in a while, if it was confiscated, we'd just go to the kitchen and get new stuff.
"We had the best food smuggled into our dorm from the kitchen. Steaks, veal cutlets, shrimp, red snapper. Whatever the hacks could buy, we ate. It cost me two, three hundred a week. Guys like Paulie spent five hundred to a thousand bucks a week. Scotch cost thirty dollars a pint. The hacks used to bring it inside the walls in their lunch pails. We never ran out of booze, because we had six hacks bringing it in six days a week. Depending upon what you wanted and how much you were willing to spend, life could be almost bearable. Paulie put me in charge of the cash. We always had two or three thousand stashed in the room. When the funds were ru
"Our days were spent on work details, going to rehabilitation programs and school, assembling for meals, and recreation. Almost everybody had a job, since it got you time off and it counted a lot with the parole board. Even so, there were guys who just wouldn't work. They usually had so much time or were such bad parole risks that they knew they'd max out no matter how hard they worked. Those guys would just sit in their cells and pull their time. Joh